Poor Dan eventually fell asleep, standing upright on all four legs in the back of the trailer with the horse and other donkeys. At least sleep gave him a blissful escape from the smells, the sounds, and the blurred shapes of the other occupants being hauled cross-country.
He woke suddenly when the truck came to a stop, causing the sleeping Dan to fall against the donkey in front of him and push his nose against the other animal's smelly rear-end. His thick lips curled back in disgust, exposing his ugly teeth.
He wanted to rub his eyes and stretch, but when he tried his forelegs refused to cooperate as signaled. "What the hell?" Dan said only to hear, not words, but a hateful screeching bray shatter the silence and rush his new reality back into the forefront of his addled thoughts.
"Eee-Haw!" Dan brayed. "Eee-Haw!" In his mind, he was demanding to know where they were, but he could only make the sound of his new kind.
The driver and the other man in the truck opened the trailer and began trotting out their cargo of horse and donkeys. Dan stood passively in the shade of a tall tree after one of the men led him from the trailer. He saw the horse and the alpha donkey sharing the same shade slightly to his left. The others were panting hard. The back of the trailer had gotten hot as Dan slept. He felt his own sides heaving and his lips pulling back as he opened his own mouth and sucked down fresh air himself.
He gradually noticed an older man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat accompanied by two younger men in similar dress. They looked at the horse and then spoke to the men from the truck. Dan couldn't understand their words, but he saw money exchange hands.
The humans next turned their attention to the donkeys. The business went smoothly until they came to Dan.
"Look at the beast," the man in the hat said. "He's fat and worthless. Look at that mangy hide."
The truck's driver replied, but the potential buyer frowned. "The beast isn't even shoed," he said, shaking his head.
Dan wondered what would happen if the man didn't want to buy him. Although he couldn't understand the words being spoken, he could judge the body language of the men. Would they take him back home?
Suddenly, the man pointed beneath Dan's belly. The two younger men laughed.
"He could earn his keep mating with the mare," the farmer said. "Get myself a team of mules, perhaps, that way."
Dan couldn't even begin to guess why everyone was staring at and pointing to his donkey penis. The farmer circled behind him, lifted Dan's tail, and satisfied himself that the beast's balls looked healthy.
He still wasn't pleased, but he made a package deal to take all the asses at what he considered a good price. The men with the truck agree and, just like that, transferred Dan and the other animals into the keeping of their new owners. Dan became one more addition to the livestock on the farm owned and operated by the Yoder family. Father Levi Yoder, with his two sons, Aaron and David, worked the farm with the help of horses, donkeys and some oxen.
Dan felt a pang of fear as he saw the men close up the trailer and get back into the truck without him. The finality of the moment prompted a round of anguished braying.
"Eee-Haw! Eee-Haw!" Dan protested as the truck drove out of sight, abandoning him to this new life as a beast of burden on an Ohio farm.
The man in the hat considered the braying donkey for a moment before he spoke to his two sons. "Aaron, you take that animal and shoe it," he said. "David, you get the horse and the jacks settled."
Braying the whole time, Dan hadn't even paid attention to the spoken words, English being as incomprehensible to him as Latin. He only stopped braying when one of the younger men stepped forward and wasted no time in fastening a bridle around Dan's face. Once that was done, the man led a compliant Dan toward a large barn.
Dan watched as the man reached into a bin and pulled out four horseshoes. Only these would be donkey shoes, Dan realized, knowing they were meant for him. He stared at the curved metal shoes on the work bench as the man reached for a hammer.
"Eeh-Haw!" Dan objected. Having the metal shoes nailed into his hooves would be one more descending step into the life of a mere beast.
The man wasn't having any of it. He knew what to do, even if Dan didn't, and forced Dan into the necessary movements until with a series of firm taps he had the first shoe on Dan's front left hoof.
Dan placed the shoed hoof on the floor of the barn and felt the strangeness of it.
Even as he tried to adjust himself, the man moved on to repeat the process on another hoof. Dan cooperated because he had no idea how to resist. The young man soon had all four of the donkey's hooves wearing new metal shoes.
For Dan, the shoes represented another piece of evidence that he had no control over his life and that he had no observable differences from the farm's other donkeys.
He then ignored the animal and left Dan to gradually learn what he could expect from this new life.